Look at Her
If she could give you nothing but
A wink, a wave, a flounce,
A sashay showing off her legs,
She would not stint an ounce,
For she desires, requires, aspires
To flirt with you anon
In hopes that with these wiles of hers
It’s she on whom you’ll fawn,
Because she has a crazy crush
That cow-eyes cannot cure
And wants no more in life or death
Than be your cynosure.
Appraisal
What’s the current market value of a hug, caress or kiss?
Why would any self-respecting person get engrossed in this?
Isn’t it a tad surprising we’d make such hullabaloo
Of this silly, unproductive, non-remunerative goo?
That’s the miracle of romance and of loving: that we choose
To pursue ridiculous intangibles among the ooze
Of lace valentines and candies, in hand-holding, making eyes
Like moo-cows and fuzzy puppies at each other—but the prize
Found in all this crazy weirdness, wacky though our loving be,
Is the exponential return on this small investment that we see
When beloved turns to lover and responds in foolish kind:
That’s the truth toward which we hover when two loves get so entwined.
Between us, my husband and I have nine outstanding nephews, all of whom we adore. We have one niece. She was born 22 years ago today. Any questions? 
Goddesses Beware
My dearest darling, grand, almighty,
So surpasses Aphrodite
In each nuance womanhood
Considers lovely, fine and good—
And never mind what men prefer,
All being ten times more in her—
What panegyric can I make,
What genuflections, what grand hymns
Of obloquy, as evening dims,
Shall I sing for my niece’s sake?
Is there a form of worship deep
Enough to compass the extent
Of family greatness, heaven-sent,
We mortals are so blessed to keep?
It’s said that Cleanliness is Next to Godliness, and regardless of your beliefs, a clean kitchen is surely going to keep you closer to the desirable state of ideal health and well-being than a slovenly one. A rotten, filthy kitchen, on the contrary, may well send you off to meet your maker (or annihilation) with unwelcome rapidity. In my experience, Good Eating is Next to Perfect Happiness.
Simply eating well–whether of the most esoteric or exotic or splendidly gourmet meals, or of the handful-of-greens with some impeccably ripe apricots, a speck of salt and pepper and a drizzle of lemon-infused honey pristineness–that act of tasting and enjoying is its own reward. Love of good eating and the happiness that accompanies and follows it are worthy sorts of pleasures.
The process by which the meal or nibble is achieved can be grand delights, too. Just happening on the desired food serendipitously, even sometimes without having realized there was a desire at all, is lovely. Planning a dish, a menu, an event can be a satisfying challenge and adventure. Hunting (in field, stream or market) can be your surprisingly meditative, endorphin-brewing action sequence to prepare for the meal making itself.
Along with all of this is the primary joy of dining with others: the communal happiness and yes, meaning that can be cultivated in shared eating. The love of good food is magnified, multiplied exponentially, by the reflection of that affection between those at table. With strangers and acquaintances, it is the magnanimity–the largeness of spirit–inherent in hospitality that binds and bonds us. Among friends and loved ones, the food is both expression and enhancement of the finest graces in our connections to one another. And I can think of no lovelier thing to stock in my kitchen than that.
Pull up a chair and have a piece of pear-blackberry pie with me!
Adjusting the Balance of Powers
I make no pretense of refinement,
Charm-school graces, savoir-faire—
I’m no more mannered than a monkey
Picking cooties from its hair—
In fact, I’d never boast of
Attributes I’d likely waste,
Having little use or need for
Proving further I’ve great taste
Than I did when I selected
You as partner, lover, mate;
All alone, that one maneuver
Proved my social skills are great,
Even if the sorry outcome
On your side is to undo
Any special social standing
That once appertained to you!
Happy Father’s Day, Dad! I know there was a time when you might’ve wished you’d had actual children and got us instead, but since you never left childhood entirely behind yourself, I think we can call it even. And just think, your offspring are following blithely in your footsteps to keep our own youthful high spirits intact via non-emergence into full adult behavior, so between us we’re all waving the old family flag pretty handily indeed. We’re only so good at it, of course, because we’ve had such an outstanding and irrepressible example in front of us all along.
I’m grateful for the training in reckless enthusiasm, Teflon ego-building, rampant silliness, and all of the other life skills you have generously shared with us by guidance and example all along the way. I like to think I’m getting fairly good at all of that myself, but will never tire of knowing that it’s shared and that I perform my junior jollities in the shadow of a true master. A good father gives his offspring a happy childhood; a great father carries it on with his children so they never have to give up its joys completely. Thanks to your showing me the way, I can’t imagine ever losing my delight in the mystery and adventure and simple goofiness that life can bring, and that is a fantastic gift anyone less happy would have to envy. I hope you know how deeply–and yes, seriously–it’s appreciated, not just on Father’s Day but every day I can celebrate an untainted sense of the grandest laughing love of life. Thanks for that.
And as with mothers, I am doubly blessed, as I realized pretty much the instant I met the man who would become my other Dad, my husband’s father. It took no time to see that there was a kindheartedness and a very merry twinkle in the eye with which I felt utterly at home, familiar and safe, and these last sixteen-plus years have continued to prove my first assessment correct. To have two fathers who keep the days filled with generosity and warmth and love and my face always turned toward the smiling sun is truly a treasure that will never, ever grow old.
SoundingIn the hands of a master
The melody played so sweetly runs
Like a playful rivulet down the hall
Spilling an invitation to
Light-footed dancing, to
Birds chittering along, to light
Flickering between the window blinds
To call all of us down the passage
To bathe in its cool music
All our Loves
All our friends are singing
In the chorus on a Saturday
And though I know they will be fine
And sing it well, I have to say
That hearing all our friends ring out
In chorus is more complex still
Than polyphonic harmonies
And counterpoint, and what we will
Be loving best and savoring
On the occasion, likely, is
The sheer delight of soaking in
That all these loves are mine and his
Much of the repertoire categorized as Early Music by us modern folk was, whether religious or secular in nature, directly connected with the ideas of Heaven and Hell. Not surprisingly, a great many of these songs used love–doomed or newly married, joyful or unrequited, chaste or wildly earthy, or whatever brand was of interest in the moment–as the vehicle for exploring the concepts of Heaven and Hell. We are only able to conceive of and interpret any grand philosophy or construct through the lens of the familiar, and best so, through what excites our attention and preoccupies our waking hours. Love, in all of its myriad aspects, is a logical choice indeed for such explorations.
The programs sung and played thus far this week at Berkeley have been unsurprisingly full of love, lust, longing and loneliness and all of their cousinly affections, then. I had to laugh when a humorous piece contrasting Heaven and Hell included text and visual references in the performance that made Hell seem remarkably likely to be just another name for Texas, but that’s merely a reflection of this same recognition factor that makes songs of love such a universal language, so globally appealing.The whole festival this week is in itself a fine microcosm and affirmation of this communal language, created by not only the sharing of these great and even the not-so-great pieces of music, but also richly by the sharing of our common interest in music and the arts and the newly fledged acquaintances and enriched relationships that come from our all crossing paths in this event, by coming together as it were to sing the same song and revisit our sense of love and its wonders.
Now, let the players and singers strike up another chord!
Some years ago on this very date there was a shift in the universe. It wasn’t exactly an unexpected one, in the sense that it had been foreseen for about nine months, but surely its full grandeur could not have been predicted. And not everyone on earth knew right away what a wonder had occurred, because the wild and wonderful event in question was the birth of my third sister.
While she was, like the others–I can’t speak for Big Sister‘s first two years except upon having studied pictures of her effortlessly spectacular adorableness before my own appearance in this plane of existence–charming, pretty and charismatic from the start, there was no way of knowing in advance just how fabulous she would prove to be. That’s the thing about siblings: they are inherently outliers to our frame of reference until their influence on our lives appears in real time. And like our two other sisters, the youngest was her own brand of greatness from the start.
What we quickly learned was that she had a uniquely clever and witty point of view and was rather fearless about besting her trio of big sisters in many a moment simply by sitting back and watching our various adventures, figuring out where we might have gone a bit astray with them, and powering on ahead when her turn came. This was perhaps most evident to the rest of us when she would check in with our parents on whether a particular action of any of ours that seemed just a little outrageous was in fact worthy of our getting in trouble over, and if not, then couldn’t she do it, too? [I am not entirely certain that she wasn’t occasionally disappointed when we weren’t in trouble for the activity in question, but that’s a topic for another day.]
And Little Sister wasn’t very old at all when some wise guy quizzed all of us girls on our life’s plans. What did we intend to be or do when we grew up? Undoubtedly he was looking for some nice, pat conventional answer like Teacher or Nurse or some superlative man’s nice little wife, but my littlest sister’s response was unhesitatingly ‘Amazing but true!’ We did not quite grasp at the time that this was indeed both a plan and a vocation, but by cracky, she turned out to have gotten it exactly right. In all of the years since, she has been and done many things, accomplished a tremendous amount, continued to be charming and beautiful and charismatic, and absolutely has embodied a life’s saga that despite being utterly Amazing is still entirely True. We can all vouch for both aspects.
She has been, in various turns, an outstanding student, a fine violinist, and an intrepid traveler; all three of my sisters studied and/or worked overseas at college age, and this youngest met and married our superlative brother-in-law while doing so and has now lived longer in Norway than she did in the US. She speaks Norwegian not just like a good student of the language or even like a person whose lineage encouraged her to hone it to refinement but like a native-born speaker, which prompted one of her nephews in his youth to proclaim her the Smartest Sister in our family. Since I happen to think each of my sisters the Smartest One as well as the Most Fabulous (and if you can’t do that kind of math, refer back to my post on Auntie Ingeborg’s science of favorites) I wouldn’t disagree with that assessment. My sister has been an administrator, translator, friend, daughter, wife and mother, and much more. She has navigated the waters of an adventure-filled life with both nerve and verve and I still marvel at her excellence every day.
So, on this anniversary of that auspicious occasion whereon she first graced us with her presence, I can say as I always have and always will that her arrival completed the set of our family in ways that we could never have expected or would have dared to wish, and filled any empty spaces, even where we didn’t know they’d existed, with a rare form of love and happiness. I thank her for this gift of herself. And I wish for her many, many more years of being as Amazing as ever!
Building Strong BonesIn the lovely resonant
shadowed hollow of
an architectural ruin,
the beauties of
its skeleton become
more than engineering,
more than a means
of shelter or a clever
way to shut people
in or out–
What happens is
life becomes caught
in the interstices of
a building’s bones–
vitality drawn off
from all the smaller lives
that have come through;
in the humming open space
of a lovely
building in ruin,
mortality is kept
as though in a jewel-case
or a body quite perfectly made
for being loved
The depth of the lake cannot be guessed
Its shimmering silicate glacial glow
With turquoise mask screens what’s below
In filtered glimmer, thought at best
To be just deep enough to hold
Beneath the frigid upper glass
Down in its centermost crevasse
Something mysterious, so old
It’s passed from memory and ken
And only surfaces when stars
Come showering down as red as Mars
To call it upward once again
Communing with its antique kin
For roaring moments in the night
Before the day dawns turquoise bright
And glassy water closes in
Once more its inexpressive glow
A wall of silence ageless, stern
And secretive, where none can learn
What lives those fathoms down below
Art-Colored Glasses 